Increasingly, doctors warn against the overstimulation of the child — the lingering attentions of the parent, the rising rigor of the public school system and extracurricular training, not to mention books and film. “The fundamental requirement,” we are advised, “is to keep the child free from over-fatigue every hour of the day.”117 In 1910, the Child Health Committee, supported by the Bureau of Education, institutes a standard of “13 hours of sleep for children 5–6, 12 for those 6–8, 11 for those 10–12, 10 1/2 for those 12–14, 10 for those 14–16, and still 9 1/2 up to 18.”118 Many experts argue about those numbers, some demanding less, some even more, the common denominator being that the child’s life schedule should be rigorous and in tune with the caretaking adult’s. More manuals beget more parental worry beget more attenuation to the child beget the child’s increasing attenuation to the self. Set regular bedtimes. Consult your doctor. Be wary, and prepared.
During World War I, “sleeping epidemics” in the form of encephalitis lethargica spread. In Africa, parasites with trembling membranes enter the flesh and multiply, infecting humans, horses, cows into a deep sleep from which they cannot be aroused. We are encouraged more often to recycle, feeding old shapes back into making new. There is more tangled air in all the speaking, eating, seeing by the hour. Houses grow to hold more artificial glow. Freud starts talking not only about what dreams mean, but how within them our limbs are paralyzed so as not to allow us to act them out. People are regularly X-rayed, photographed inside the body. We get automation and sound film. Each day there are new walls built, old ones torn down. Joseph Jules Dejerine says, “Sleep cannot be localized.”
In 1928, we get sliced bread, antibiotics. Pavlov demonstrates the programmed automation of the animal by making dogs respond as machines, demonstrating how we humans also are. John Watson notes how “perfect homes had no outsiders dealing with infants.”119 Cribs proliferate in design, beginning a league of further trends in parenting that fluctuate and flow like the procession of stylish clothes. Your child might be judged on what he or she is wearing, same as you are. This is a reflection of who you are, both morally, and in mind. Older relatives less often live inside their offspring’s house, keeping their own air, or relegated to group homes, where they spend the last years of their lives. Children get their own rooms in the growing houses, as do each parent their own bed. “It is much better to sleep by yourself,” they say. They’re always talking. “You can rest better and breathe fresher air if you have a bed all your own.”120
Someone invents the radio. Someone invents the TV. There is a new term: chronic fatigue. Several major U.S. cities ban elementary school homework, in coalition against our children’s growing night anxiety. The earth, turning, makes no sound as far as we hear. More and more stimuli are considered factors affecting sleep. Opiates, once considered easy sleep aids, are found addictive, frowned upon — in their place, a growing population of new meds. Neurochemists test their ideas burning portions out of the minds of rats.
In 1929, Hans Berger records the electricity of a human brain, leading to the use of the electroencephalograph for tracking the activity of sleep. Aserinsky and Kleitman birth the phrase “rapid eye movement,” and link it to the seeing of the mind inside the dreaming state, which is soon thereafter subdivided into regions, shifting states. Now sleep as a place is polarized. Everybody’s still looking for the specific organ or the cells responsible for nodding out. We are told to consider light and sound, with new emphasis on airflow and uncrowding of sleep space, and so our brain’s air, and so our emotional well-being. Dr. Spock says kids’ bedtimes can be varied, attuned to rhythms, as long as presented in a pleasant way. No matter which choice you make there are those who will say the opposite is true.
In 1932, Ranson shows that placing lesions on the brainstem makes a person sleepy. Three years later Bremer shows that lesions placed specifically on the lateral hypothalamus cause drowsiness by deactivating the “waking center”—the first directly named finding of a neurological insomniac cue, if caused passively, and by prodding. Sleep maintenance is linked to serotonin, the substance that later, as the century begins to close, will be taught to birth out of a pill. Forel studies systems of bees and talks about circadian rhythms’ effect in humans. Bedtime prayers involving latent fear are warned against for causing anxiety before bed, no more If I should die before I wake…
In 1938, we get LSD. We get the ballpoint pen. Scholars perform experiments in isolation underground and in huge caves outside of light and speech and sound to show that there are periods innate to the person — that time is in our blood. Among children, it is cool, frontier-like, to stay up later. “Certainly one would never want to teach a child to be dependent on being held or rocked to sleep,” they say.121 Antonin Artaud coins the term la réalité virtuelle, which in coming years will be used to sell video games. At least 15 million bodies become murdered based on words emerged from one man’s mouth.
In 1945, we get the microwave oven, the Slinky, nuclear weapons. In 1946, we get mobile phones. Certain people are easier to find without their cooperation. Their bodies radiate the heat. We become targets, followed, complexly haunted. Carcinogens collect in pockets, at our cells. People start finding and naming even more sleep disorders, which beget more clinical diagnoses, which beget more and more and more medications. There are more books, more words within them, more ideas relegated to what a dream might mean. In 1950-something, Samuel Beckett writes: “Name, no, nothing is namable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have begun.”122
In 1951, Eugene Aserinsky records his eight-year-old son’s eyes through a whole night by EEG and EOG. He notices two phases of the eyes’ movement: twenty-minute periods when the eyes rapidly jerk around behind the lid, as if in seeing, and sixty- to ninety-minute stationary periods occurring regularly between. Based on this information, the basic model for sleep is renovated to include two major modes: when the eyes are still (non-rapid eye movement, NREM) and when our eyes move as they might in seeing while awake (rapid eye movement, REM). A single night’s sleep typically involves four to six periods of strobing between these two. Each lasts, on average, seventy minutes to two hours, with variation.
Later, the NREM period is further subdivided into four stages: Stage 1, in which the shift between waking and sleeping begins — becoming drowsy, the brain’s alpha waves turn slow; stage 2, in which the alpha rhythms slow down further, into theta, punctuated by small bursts of electricity called “sleep spindles.” These first two stages are often brief, but may stretch longer for the busy-brained, and may seem to some not like sleep at all. Stages 3 and 4 are known as delta sleep, the brain slowing down to high-amplitude, low-activity delta waves; muscle tone turns lax; the heartbeat quiets, decreasing metabolism; these stages serve as a door into REM. REM is further found to differ from the NREM in that the brain becomes dramatically activated in electricity and metabolic rate — blood flow to the brain increases 62 to 173 percent; flesh holds a cold-blooded mode; vast jumps occur up and down in breathing and pulse; we experience vivid dreams. Through these facets, sleep now at last has some ground of operational understanding that will hold on as scientific fact, though for the most part we’ll proceed almost nowhere in the way of knowing why any of it happens, or what it means.